


Choices

by Phlogistics



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post DoFP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1686158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlogistics/pseuds/Phlogistics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven tries to find a place where she can be her own person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choices

Freedom is a strange feeling. Raven has spent so many years chained to ghosts and monsters that to be suddenly free of them leaves her with a discomforting guilt, as if leaving Trask behind (unfairly, disgustingly alive) means leaving behind her friends, too. She knows she hasn’t, if only because their autopsy photos still resurface every night in her dreams, but the feeling remains as she makes her way across the globe.

She doesn’t have a destination, at least not really. Away from Charles and Erik, as far as she can take herself, is the only plan. The stubborn pain in her calf will probably fade long before her sense of betrayal does, and Charles’s metaphorical release won’t mean anything if she goes crawling home the moment after he's offered it. The two of them need time to lick their wounds, to build themselves back up a little more before they inevitably tear each other down again. They love each other, but she doubts that love will be enough to fix everything for either of them. Having Charles’s respect, though, after all this time—it means a lot.

She still ends up booking herself a one-way flight to Japan.

By this point, she’s already tried Germany, France, Russia—all places she’d loved during her previous visits and that she’d hoped to revisit once she wasn’t being driven there by the mission. But traces of Erik linger in all of them, and she finds herself irritated and depressed more than relieved. Japan is one of the few places she knows for certain that none of them have ever had cause to visit, which means it’s the ideal place for her to pretend they don’t exist for at least a few weeks. It also means she’s less than familiar with the language, but she’s always been good at picking up that kind of thing. She spends the flight reading a book of useful words and phrases, but doesn’t bother trying to figure out how to read more than the most basic characters. Admitting that she’s a tourist won’t be the most humiliating thing she’s ever had to do.

She arrives in Tokyo in midafternoon, steals the wallet of a businessman who’d been harassing the flight attendant, and hops on the first train she can find to a city she’s never heard of. It’s not that she thinks anybody is going to come looking for her, exactly, or even that it would be any easier to hide from Charles in a minor city than in the capital, but the urge to escape has kept her moving this long. She doesn’t feel like forcing a stop yet.

When she arrives, she finds that Mitakihara is a more compact city than she’d thought it would be, but she figures that will just make it easier for her to get around without needing to steal someone’s car. Shrugging off her exhaustion, she foregoes looking for housing in order to plop herself down in the nearest tourist-friendly coffee house, roman letters blazing on the sign: “C’est un Café!”

The bored-looking cashier greats her in English, clearly having sized up Raven’s current face as belonging to a foreigner. Raven gives her most charming smile. “Just a black coffee, please,” she says.

The girl rings her up quickly and wishes her a good day, hands her the drink, and ducks into the back room to chat with a coworker. Raven sits down at one of the many unoccupied window seats, content to watch the crowds pass by. A few faces stick out to her, and she sets to memorizing them in case she needs to trade identities quickly, but for the most part she’s happy to play a solo version of the people-watching game she and Charles used to adore.

He, of course, had had the advantage of being a telepath and instantly knowing whatever scandalous thoughts pedestrians happened to be lingering on, but Raven had a natural instinct for people that made her guesses nearly as good as his. Charles had attributed it to her gift, but Raven knew that it was just as much a skill born out of necessity during a childhood of near-starvation.

It’s less fun by herself, she decides quickly. And it’s not exactly an effective way of keeping her distance from her brother.

She sticks on that word for a second. It’s been a long time since she let herself think of Charles that way, and she’s not yet sure if she likes it. She’ll figure it out later, she decides, and walks out onto the street to mingle with the crowd.

She slips into Hank’s face, another ease she hasn’t allowed herself in years. There’s something about his awkward earnestness that she wants right now, and this is the closest she’s going to get after killing the thing between them. She decides not to examine the urge to much for fear of upsetting the small peace it's supplied. She wanders like that for a while longer before finally caving to her tiredness and scouting out the nearest cheap motel. She pays for one night, walks to her room, and falls asleep on the cheap mattress the second she touches it.

Her dreams are filled with screams and fairy wings, and she wake’s with Angel’s name on her lips.

“Sorry,” she whispers to the empty room.

Raven lets herself languish in bed for another hour, slipping in and out of restless sleep, before she finally decides she’s getting too hungry to indulge herself any longer. She grabs the stolen wallet, morphs into a copy of woman she saw yesterday, and returns her key at the front desk. The man there gives her a strange look as he checks out a petite Japanese woman from the room registered to Alex Cassidy, but doesn’t say anything.

She goes back to the coffee house. It’s a different girl there today, though she doesn’t look any more interested in the job than the other had. This time she’s greeted in Japanese, so she makes a fumbling effort to reply in kind. The girl’s casually raised eyebrow lets Raven know how atrocious her accent is, but she gets her coffee and croissant all the same, so she’s not going to complain. She sits at a small table against the wall, opting to study the interior decorating.

She’s just about finished her coffee when the door opens again, and a frustrated-looking woman walks inside, cursing softly in English. Despite the dark glasses and walking stick marking her impaired vision, Raven still has the impression that she’s surveying the whole café with incredible frustration. The woman orders a drink in impeccable Japanese, takes it with a polite nod, and then immediately walks over to Raven’s table.

“Do you mind if I join you?” she asks, again in English.

“I’m not really up for company, actually,” Raven says, wary.

“I’m sorry,” she says, frowning, “but that’s not an answer I can accept right now. My name is Irene, and I need your help.”

Raven immediately stands, heading towards the door. “Sorry, you’ve definitely got the wrong person.” Her skin itches, and in just a moment she’ll be outside where no one will even have no realize she’s been here—

“Please,” the woman says. Something in her voice gives Raven pause, and she halts, her hand on the door. “This is—I’m sorry, I just didn’t realize what kind of day today would be. I’m not usually this rude or demanding, but a good friend of mine has just died and I could’ve stopped it if I’d only believed what I’d seen.” The weight of grief in her voice is familiar, and painfully genuine. “People like us still need you, Raven.”

Raven spins around, eyes darting fearfully towards the service counter, but the girl there had apparently fled to the back after taking Irene’s order. Raven stalks back over to the table and wraps her hand around the woman’s throat. She barely reacts, even though Raven knows she must be causing her pain. “Who sent you?”

Irene coughs, laying her hand on Raven’s wrist almost nonchalantly, thought the sweat beading at her temple belies the movement. Her expression says, _I can’t answer if I can’t breathe_. Raven loosens her grip enough for the woman to sigh.

“I knew this would happen, yet somehow I still manage to be surprised,” she says, almost to herself. “No one sent me, Raven. I simply saw that we could meet here, and so here we’re meeting.”

“You can see the future?” Raven asks doubtfully.

Irene hums. “More than I'd believed to be true up until yesterday. And enough, I think, to know that if I’m going to save anyone, I’ll need your help.”

“And why should I believe you?”

Irene smiles. “You don’t have to,” she says. “I’d just really like you to. The choice is yours. You can decide to humor me, see what proof I have to offer—or you can leave right now, and I’ll never see you again.”

Raven hesitates for a moment, then releases Irene. The woman caresses her throat gently, tracing along still-red outline of Raven’s hand. “There are worse things that have happened to me lately than a woman struggling to keep her hands off me,” she remarks suddenly. Startled, Raven lets out a short laugh.

It feels like she hasn’t laughed in years. Maybe she hasn’t.

“I’ll go with you,” she says suddenly. “Show me your proof.”

Irene lights up. It's not the worst sight Raven's seen recently, she decides.

**Author's Note:**

> I just really want Raven to have lots of fic written about her, and also queer ladies rule my heart. So that's how this happened, I suppose. I was a little unsure of how I wanted to introduce Irene-- their relationship in the comics comes about when Raven is such a different person, so I ended up tweaking it quite a bit to fit more into the atmosphere of the movieverse. Hopefully it went alright, though. Let me know what you thought!


End file.
